Tim Myers is a writer, songwriter, storyteller, and lecturer at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley. His children’s books have won recognition from the New York Times, NPR, The Smithsonian, Nickelodeon, and many others. He’s published over 100 poems, won a prize in a poetry contest judged by John Updike, won a major prize in science fiction, has been nominated for a Pushcart for an essay, and has published much other fiction and non-fiction.

These poems begin as an examination of tongues and other body parts but expand to become an examination of nature and the humanity that helps make up what we call "nature." Tim Myers's poems are fascinating in the questions they pose and the challenge they offer the reader to answer in a clear, precise poetic vocabulary.

February 1991

Tonight on the car radio
I heard a trumpet revealing,
in minor scales, the eventual death
of the sun.

At the game today a misthrown ball
went flying into the stands.
A father threw his arms around
his little girl, instantly, thoughtlessly.
The bitterness of wasted deaths
cannot overcome the truth
of his gesture.

There’s a war on now. They made
love at midnight
in utter joy and abandon.
How many millennia did it take
before we could make a plough—a book—a school?

I have books, and the great dead
as if voices in my own ears, tonight.

We must adjust the budget
for unexpected military expenditures.
In my love’s belly the bones
of our child are forming.